Reporter reflects: Houston turning itself into...

1of9In this photo made Monday, Dec. 22, 2014, a well pump works at sunset on a farm near Sweetwater, Texas. At the heart of the Cline, a shale formation once thought to hold more oil than Saudi Arabia, Sweetwater is bracing for layoffs and budget cuts, anxious as oil prices fall and its largest investors pull back. (AP Photo/LM Otero)Photo: LM Otero, STF

3of9MAYOR BOB LANIER ADDRESSING REPORTERS AFTER CITY COUNCIL MEETING FOR STORY MARKING HIS FIRST YEAR IN OFFICE. (01/05/1993) By Carlos Antonio Rios/Houston Chronicle Staff. HOUCHRON CAPTION (01/26/2004): Former Mayor Bob Lanier gives Oliver Luck an A for his administration of the bureaucracy that built Houston's sports venues. SPECIAL SECTION: SUPER BOWL XXXVIII 6 DAYS TO KICKOFF.Photo: CARLOS ANTONIO RIOS, Staff

4of9Passengers wait for a Metro light rail train along the new Red Line extension Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013, in Houston. The $756 million, 5.3 mile extension of the current Red Line opened Saturday. ( Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle )Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff

7of9Houston's professional baseball, football and basketball teams all play in the heart of the city. There has never been serious consideration to putting the teams anywhere in the suburbs, a testament to the importance placed on the city's core. When the Astros left the famed Astrodome, the team moved just a few miles over to downtown.Photo: Howard Castleberry, staff

8of9CONTACT FILED: ASTRODOME-HOUSTON. 03/31/1992 - view of the Astrodome with downtown skyline in the background. HOUCHRON CAPTION (07/23/2000): NONE. (USED AS PART OF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION ON WACKY THINGS TO RENT.)Photo: Howard Castleberry, staff

In April 1993, when I moved to Houston for the third and final time, the city had recovered from the oil bust and was emerging as a world-class, modern cosmopolis. Or so it imagined. The truth, of course, was more complicated. There was potential, and some momentum, but crossing the threshold to great American city - not merely great big American city - was a discussion conducted in future tense. And this was before all the flooding.

I had never thought of returning to Houston. The climate struck me as awful and the city that suffered it something of a jumbled mess. Then the newspaper I worked for in San Antonio was shut down, one of many across the country to suffer such a fate. For family reasons, I was not willing to leave Texas. The choice came down to Dallas or Houston.

A quarter-century later, and even in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, selecting the latter remains the right one. Having grown up in Dallas, I understood implicitly the Good Government League-infused order of the place, the nurtured notion of planning as a good thing, the simple idea that people should know their place and comfort themselves with the certainty that smart, conservative folks were managing civic affairs properly. If you were white and middle or upper-middle class, you had only to worry about the fate of the Cowboys.

Houston was something else. It still is. And that remains part of its appeal - or it was to me. The wide avenues of north Dallas still move traffic efficiently, even if most of the better earners now called the suburbs home, and zoning keeps strip centers and fast-food joints where they're supposed to be. But buttoned-down Big D will never be a world-class city. I suspect it knows as much.

If I have learned anything in my time here, it's that relentlessly aspirational Houston has higher goals. And as I head into that great uncertainty that is retirement, having spent at least a little time in every quarter of the city, I no longer am so skeptical about its chances of reaching them, even if it shoots itself in the foot every third step of the way. No pain, no gain - it could be the official civic motto. As local folks were busy eyeing the creeping price of a barrel of crude, praying that a corner had been turned and maybe some of the companies would hire again, Big Rain took the place of Big Oil in defining the Houston of today.

Harvey and its trillion gallons of water showed the arrogance of thinking that a few retention ponds and the promises of confident hydrologists really meant anything. The argument that so much rain fell in such a short period that no amount of regulation or preparation could have contained it is a valid one. But previous recent floods and the prospect of them manifesting a "new normal" meant a greater level of vulnerability than had been appreciated.

So now there's another challenge on the list. Just below it is another matter of flow, this involving people and their cars. For all its cultural amenities or reasons to brag - a certain orange-clad team hoisted a World Series trophy only last month - Houston can be hard to get around. Having a resident opera company and shabby public transportation is, to say the least, a mixed message.

'Two decades behind'

Any discussion of Houston's assets gets awkward when the matter of mobility arises. Freeways have been widened and new ones built, albeit with tolls attached, and a halting effort toward light rail is at least underway. By contrast, Dallas has been busy building 93 miles of rail, 70 more than Houston. I focus on this because any list of public complaints about Houston's quality of life emphasizes the challenge of getting from point A to point B. In short, the city is at least two decades behind.

In other ways, Houston has done better. The late Bob Lanier, who served as mayor when I moved here, had seen the consequences when cities ignored their aging core. So-called doughnut cities had prosperous suburbs and empty, decaying centers - a much more pernicious mixed message and potentially a fatal one. See Detroit. He recognized that Houston needed a thriving downtown and close-in neighborhoods that people wanted to live in. The implications were greater than they might have appeared. Failure to achieve that would have meant a declining tax base and even more imperiled public schools.

A concerted civic effort to refashion the central city as more than a collection of skyscrapers has paid off. The Astros and Rockets now are settled in here, as is an increasing population of high-rise residents. Vintage commercial buildings are being repurposed as living quarters, a radical concept in a place that tends to despise anything more than a generation old. A new signature green space provides an outdoor gathering spot. And the adjacent Midtown, once a land of mansions for the city's rich merchants and later a tumbledown hodgepodge, is emerging as its own sort of urban magnet. Property values inside the Loop have soared.

Greater residential density, the holy aspiration of a generation of modern urban planners, is changing the world inside the Loop. How the mostly minority residents of the old Fifth and Third wards will fare amid the makeover is an unanswered question.

The proximity to downtown makes these neighborhoods attractive to builders and gentrifiers, but those with roots there are fighting the trend. Given the city's absence of land-use controls, theirs may be a losing battle. The immutable truth is that places change. Wealthy African Americans replaced the wealthy Jewish population along South MacGregor. So, too, may their days be numbered. Houston is nothing if not dynamic, too much so for some tastes.

A place of opportunity

Not everything panned out, of course. Some hoped the tech industry might take root. Compaq was a great start, emerging as a major player in the home-computer market and eventually becoming the world's largest. But it could not survive the inevitable industry shakeout and the cutthroat environment that saw the demise of many established companies. It was swallowed up by Hewlett Packard in 2001.

I won't waste too many words about Enron, an energy company that sought an unconventional path. It created a novel trading market, embraced the tech vibe as no other in its field, then died a gory death amid criminal charges of inflating its true value and propping up its stock price. Yet as painful as Enron's fall was, Houston did not linger over its fate. There was a lot going on, big and small. No matter how humble the newcomer, no matter how much he or she knew or didn't know about this pulsing urban blob, there was opportunity.

I recall a story I wrote back in the '90s that touched on this trait in unexpected ways. The subject was the "Gulfton Ghetto," so named because it was the locus of Latino immigration and too often the scene of violent juvenile crime, much of it gang-related. Though the crime wave spoke for itself, most people did not appreciate that the "ghetto" was, in fact, a booming and vibrant community. I remembered it as a place filled with new apartment complexes which some co-workers called home when I lived in Houston for about half of 1978. Those apartments, no longer so well kept, now housed the recently arrived, and they were packed. Surrounding strip centers were filled with businesses catering to them, from taquerias to remittance shops, where the undocumented could send portions of their pay back home.

Since those days, Houston has grown on the fringes, grown in the middle, grown in pretty much every respect. The 2008 recession no doubt took a toll, as did the subsequent big drop in oil prices. Inevitable layoffs brought pain, as some of the companies that prospered amid the shale boom tumbled into bankruptcy. Others downsized.

But pain is not calamity. Another of the city's economic mainstays, health care, has mushroomed and will continue to do so. Fueled by breakthroughs technological, bio-medical and scientific - and an aging, longer-living population - the health care industry is the healthiest, as it were, of all major economic sectors in the U.S. and the one enjoying the greatest job growth. For the Texas Medical Center, already the largest in the land, the future seems to be nothing but building cranes ad infinitum.

Houston thrives. That's the message. The cycle of boom and bust tied to the fortunes of the oil patch has slowly diminished. The chamber of commerce, which goes by the curious name Greater Houston Partnership, advanced the cause of diversification, properly arguing that a great city cannot be hostage to one line of work.

A determined city

However Houston is to be defined going forward, there is no end in sight. And growth will bring more master-planned communities on the vast stretches of empty land. Many will not be within the city limits. Economically segregated, sharing little in common with the older parcels that are, they are home to vast numbers of folks with different politics and perhaps less sense of shared destiny. The Harvey effect was to numb that, at least temporarily. Even the most selfish political leaders are coming around to the notion that taming floodwaters is a regional task. Better mobility, cleaner air, aging infrastructure, enhanced visual appeal, the imperative for green space - these won't be so universally embraced.

Which brings me back to Dallas. The schools I attended there, elementary on up, remain exactly where they were. And the property that surrounds them has only grown in value, meaning those neighborhoods remain much as they were - mostly white. On the surface, little appears different, except that the children in those neighborhoods no longer attend those schools.

In the generation that followed the end of segregated schools in the early 1970s, those in north Dallas gradually lost all of their white students. A number of those schools, especially elementary and middle schools, would have remained majority white because of the racial demographics of their attendance zones. But that didn't matter.

Parents in Houston, some of them, anyway, fought to remain in public schools. Houston ISD created "school within a school" Vanguard programs to satisfy the desire for a solid curriculum and teachers to support it. Soon there were waiting lists to get into them. Specialty programs and high schools were created. Sure, some parents fled. But not all.

Maybe this says nothing about real, substantive differences between Texas' two largest cities. I don't know. One does get the sense, however, that Houston doesn't give up. I'd like to think that even those who live outside the city limits or in suburbs such as Katy or Pearland take some pride in the place that made those suburbs boom, even if they disagree with its more liberal politics. After all, the pro baseball and basketball teams play smack in the middle of town. There was never serious thought about putting them elsewhere. The Texans aren't that far away.

After Harvey hit, the Astros adopted the slogan "Houston Strong" and put it on their uniforms. Greater Houston may be a conglomeration of all manner of people and places, but there is something in the middle of it all. Whether it's a heart I'll leave for others to decide. But it sure ain't a doughnut hole.

Mike Tolson has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has worked for five newspapers, four of them in Texas. Although most of his career has been spent as a news reporter, he also wrote for features and sports sections in earlier years, and he was the city columnist for four years at the San Antonio Light.

At the Houston Chronicle, he has specialized in long-term projects and long-form weekend articles, while also handling daily reporting duties.

As a general assignments reporter, Tolson has written articles on just about every subject imaginable over the course of his career. However, he has specialized knowledge of civil and criminal justice matters.

A Georgia native, Tolson moved to Texas in 1964 and graduated from The University of Texas in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He has lived in Texas' three major cities as well as Austin, Abilene and Temple. He is married and has two children.